Introducing FindWine.co.uk

Like connect 4 on steroids – the view you are presented with on the FindWine website is a grid of coloured circles that bouncing and swivelling into play as the page loads. Roll the mouse over and they twirl in an attractive way to reveal a little bottle. This is where you consume the FindWine product list. Colourful, interactive, and intuitive. Certainly fun and innovative. Beats the dull old side bar country list of most retailers any day!

This wine grid is split horizontally by price brand and vertically by colour and style. A £9-£12 sophisticated red? That’ll be the Dominio Kasierpe Flor de Lasierpe Reserva 2000 from Navarra in Spain (£9.99). A £7-£9 filthy rich white? For you sir, that’ll be the Last Stand Unoaked Chardonnay, 2008, from South Australia at £5.99. Click the small circle and up pops a larger display with wine details and price. Small tabs also link to ‘customer reviews’ and offer details. Runs beautifully smoothly on my Windows 7 system; but how would those on older machines with lesser graphic cards or those without flash fare I wonder?

The six price bands and eight style categories does limit the company to selling just 48 wines at a time. Since my first look however a new column has been added – ‘Phenomenal Favourites’ boosting the range to 54. This column add-on ruins the effect somewhat though in that you don’t know if they are red/white/rosé or fizz. Limiting the range offered does allow a constantly changing range, small parcels and so on.

Despite the limitations I love the ease and graphical-ness of this page. This innovative approach doesn’t extend to the fine wine section or the special offers page though – back to a ‘traditional’ list and drop down menu selections sadly. The fine wine section currently offers a good selection of Australian reds in the £30+ range (including a spread of older vintages of the D’Arenberg Dead Arm Shiraz) and various clarets from the 1980’s.

“Everybody should enjoy drinking wine. Instead of worrying about countries or grapes you just have to choose which style of wine you want to drink and how much you want to spend. Then trust us to provide brilliant, delicious and interesting wines you may never have considered before.”

There is a blog attached to the site – but MH you need an RSS feed my friend! Interestingly the latest post pays homage to the other innovative online wine merchant Naked Wines.

“A lot of people ask me where the idea for Find Wine came from. The answer, rather boringly, is that I don’t really know. It came out a lot of conversation between me, John and plenty of other people, the most influential of which was Mike Awin from ABS Wine Agencies, who has always been a great believer in what we are trying to do with Find Wine.
However throughout all of our planning there was one case study that we kept coming back to as the best online wine merchant and that was Naked Wines….
Naked are most certainly doing a fantastic job of shaking up the wine trade and I will certainly be keeping an eye their success as it grows and grows. And trying to work out how I can even begin to compete!”

While the wine should be centre stage for any retailer it is often the little touches that attract to a website, nudge the bunches of grapes in the logo for example and refreshing to see Fine Wine acknowledging the competition via a blog, Innovation hasn’t yet reached a conclusion – video clips are promised. There is room for more than one Naked Wines, Find Wine is off to a great beginning.

3 Comments

Hi,
Thanks for the review, I’m the John mentioned in your quote from Mike’s blog on our site.
You’ve made some very precise observations about our site and hopefully before too long you’ll see that we too understand the need to refresh and update the site as often as necessary.
I appreciate your comments about the ‘Favourites’ column and we intend to focus this more on seasonal or event wines, so it may change to ‘wedding’ ‘birthday’ ‘apology’ recommendation etc..
Rest assured we’re also working on the fine wine area and in time this will be as funky as the rest of the site.
We’re passionate about wine and really want to open peoples eyes up to new and interesting idea, so fingers crossed they respond.
Thanks again and hopefully you’re next review we be even better!
John.

I loved the site! Way cooler then all those other boring wine websites, it made shopping for wine fun! And that’s saying something for a wine geek like me. I think they have a very well thought out selection albeit a small one. I had to pick just 6 to try and found that difficult. Great wines as well, look out for my post on their wine selection.